Bird

[megalomaniacal]

It goes without saying that Peter Capaldi was a superb Doctor, massively let down by a show-runner who was out of ideas and wrongly chasing the "right ideology" to appease a minority of overly loud morons. Discuss.

[rushy]

I disagree. I believe Peter Capaldi is a superb actor, however

1) He was not able to adapt to Moffat's dialogue half as well as Matt Smith. A lot of his line deliveries were not naturalistic as a result.

2) Moffat reinvented his Doctor every year, preventing any consistency.

The end result: the Twelfth Doctor is all over the place, and so is Capaldi's performance. Sometimes the script is witty, but he just can't deliver it the right way. Sometimes he's terrific, but the words aren't. Sometimes everything is bad, and sometimes it all comes together into perfection. But those moments are rare.

Matt had his share of bad scripts, but he was always 100% in the zone. I never felt awkward with him around, whereas I did a lot of the time with Capaldi. Maybe it's because the Eleventh Doctor was designed to be kind of goofy and off-beat, whereas the Twelfth Doctor starts off with this attitude of respectability and dignity, but then you get the tank scene and whatnot.

[Cherry Pepsi Maxil]

Capaldi's a good actor, but I never warmed to him personally. I actually found his version of the Doctor quite unlikeable. He's still better than Eccleston, though.

[Ludders II]

Poor Peter.
He would've made a great Classic Doctor had he been the age he was 11 years ago in 1979 or so.
As he was, he was saddled with the banality of NuWho and inevitably forced to dumb down the natural gravitas that his age would've allowed him to bring to the role.
Instead he was forced to succumb to the stupidity of NuWho's conception of what the Doctor as a character, should be.
With the benefit of hindsight, he should never have accepted the role. His potential was squandered. His talent wasted.

[iank]

He was wasted, though he's still better than any other NuPoo pretender other than Smithy, and there's still more of his I'd go back to than f*cking Tennant.

[megalomaniacal]

Can't disagree with any of that, to be fair.

He is a great actor and (by all accounts) a lovely guy. He would have been an exemplary classic Dr, and he is my second favourite post 2005 Dr after Matt Smith.

It just boils my piss that this life long fan landed the role of his dreams at a time when anything resembling sense was already on its way out the window.


Moff is entirely to blame IMO. I once loved the guy and his work (epecially S5) but he pissed all that up the wall quicker than a... oh fu#k it, I can't even be arsed to think of a "funny" simalie.

So I'll revise my original statement.

PC was a potentially awesome Doctor, whose talent and love for the show were completely derailed by an arsehole more interested in social media appeasement than actual quality story telling.

Thoughts?

[Cherry Pepsi Maxil]

I found Moffat overrated from the start. Even when I was a kid the Moffat ones from the RTD era (except Blink, which has always rocked) tended to be some of my least favourite ones. Silence/Forest bored me at the time. His work did improve in Series 5 with The Eleventh Hour and the Pandorica Opens, two episodes that made my jaw drop back in 2010, but he was soon back to his old ways with Series 6. Had he ended his tenure with Series 7, an improvement in quite a few ways, I wouldn't dislike him so much. He pissed away the little good will I had towards him with the Capaldi era. Even the better ones like World Enough and Time are bogged down by the dreary agenda nonsense. It saddens me to see 50% of the top ten stories in magazine polls taken up by Moffat's rinse and repeat rubbish. So many great stories like The War Games and Inferno barely get a look in, but somehow Silence in the Library makes it.

[burrunjor]

Oct 20, 2024 20:37:04 GMT Cherry Pepsi Maxil said:

I found Moffat overrated from the start. Even when I was a kid the Moffat ones from the RTD era (except Blink, which has always rocked) tended to be some of my least favourite ones. Silence/Forest bored me at the time. His work did improve in Series 5 with The Eleventh Hour and the Pandorica Opens, two episodes that made my jaw drop back in 2010, but he was soon back to his old ways with Series 6. Had he ended his tenure with Series 7, an improvement in quite a few ways, I wouldn't dislike him so much. He pissed away the little good will I had towards him with the Capaldi era. Even the better ones like World Enough and Time are bogged down by the dreary agenda nonsense. It saddens me to see 50% of the top ten stories in magazine polls taken up by Moffat's rinse and repeat rubbish. So many great stories like The War Games and Inferno barely get a look in, but somehow Silence in the Library makes it.

I generally think Moff was a better writer in the 11th Doctors era than RTD was in 9 and 10's, but I do agree that the RTD era Moff scripts are so overrated. Blink is great, and I actually do like the Library two parter. There are some exceptional moments of horror with the Vashta Nerada. However The Girl in the Fireplace and especially the season 1 two parter are so mawkish and cheesy I can't stand them. That bit where Madame DePompadour calls the Doctor an Angel is so f*cking sappy I wanted to puke when I last saw it. Moff's work at times looks the male version of badly written erotica written for middle aged women who've grown bored of their husbands to fantazise about.

Nothing annoys me more than 12th Doctor praise from fandom meanwhile. It's so hypocritical given other eras that were bashed viciously for considerably less (and I'm including other eras of New Who there. Believe it or not even the Jodie era in some ways deserves it less than the Capaldi era. FFS the Capaldi era was the one that led to EVERYTHING wrong with the Jodie era. I have 0 time for people who say Jodie was bad and praise the Capaldi era. These anti woke youtubers who say RIP DW 1963-2017 piss me off so much at times.) 

Furthermore that era was an absolute disaster with the public, yet again the new who audience who spent years saying "new who is more popular than the old you have to accept it and that's why new who is objectively better." Always let the Capaldi era off with  f*cking up and actually try and make out an era with moon eggs, oversexed female Masters starring in Mills and Boone style love stories, magic trees saving the earth, the Doctor playing a guitar on a tank, water women undoing Cybermen with the power of luuuuuuurrrrrrvvvve, a force from abooooovvvvveeee and Daleks being beaten by shit, was the thinking man's era. Sorry the thinking xersons era as that seems to be what it's fanbase would insist lest my head roll. 

[rushy]

But Burrunjor, Missy was the best Master since Roger Delgado, and they finally went back to what made that character great. You gotta love the Capaldi era for that, the chemistry between him and Gomez is just unparalleled. And her redemption arc is one of the great successes in Doctor Who history.

[iank]

New Who in general is wildly overrated but Moffat is still a vastly superior writer to Davies on every level.
The problem again lies with the showrunner as supreme authority crap. He needed a script editor or a producer above him to go "nah, that's no good."
But he's still the best New Who writer on every level, and his era is still the only one even worth a look at.

[burrunjor]

Oct 20, 2024 23:03:07 GMT rushy said:

But Burrunjor, Missy was the best Master since Roger Delgado, and they finally went back to what made that character great. You gotta love the Capaldi era for that, the chemistry between him and Gomez is just unparalleled. And her redemption arc is one of the great successes in Doctor Who history.

I think Moffs taming a bad girl fantasy/redemption arc was done better the third time with Tasha Lem. NOT because that was well done at all, but at least it was restricted to one episode unlike Missy/River and at least it was in the background, and at least we got Daleks as the ones he had to save her from rather than the Numbskulls from the Beano with River or Muslim stereotypes that somehow Cumberbatch was able to infiltrate and outfight with a sword? Yeah I'd totally expect a detective to be able to outfight 4 handy bastard terrorists with a cutlass. Is Sherlock f*cking Bruce Lee all of a sudden?

[zarius]

Oct 21, 2024 6:48:45 GMT iank said:

The problem again lies with the showrunner as supreme authority crap. He needed a script editor or a producer above him to go "nah, that's no good."

I thought series 5 and 6 were probably the best examples of that, Piers Wenger made the show look and feel like a million bucks before the summer gap of 2011.

Then Wenger became head of the whole drama department, and Moffat's era never recovered.